This invention relates generally to social networking and, more specifically, to adding social context to advertisements pointing outside of a social networking system.
Social networking systems maintain information about users in a social graph, which may include edges and nodes representing interactions and connections between objects in the social networking system. Hence, the social graph allows the social networking system to build relationships between objects, such as users. Based on these relationships, affinities between the users and social networking objects may be determined and used to identify content for presentation to users. For example, affinities may be used to select advertisements for presentation to a user.
However, some advertisements link to content external to the social networking system, such as pages hosted by a website in a domain outside of the social networking system. This external content may not be associated with an object in the social networking system, preventing the social networking system from determining social context or affinities for the external content. Without social context or affinity for the external content, the social networking system is unable to effectively target presentation of the external content to social networking system users likely to be interested in the external content.